I have a TCL Flip 2, which I ordered a while ago as Tracfone locked. Trying to activate now with Tracfone, they are saying it wasn’t activated, so it’s essentially a brick. Anything I can do with it?
First suggestion would be to call TracFone again. They suck and at least on my experience often tell you nonsense and then you can again and another guy picks up and does it. The other option is figuring out how to unlock it…
Yes, true, but also the website is giving the error that happens when you have a non-activated phone. Then, when I chatted with them, she gave me a whole ChatGPT recommendation on how to go to the store to ask them to re-scan it.
I actually once had it with phones that I was able to tell were purchased from Target. I actually walked back into Target to self-checkout with yeasr-old LG phones, scanned the barcode at self-checkout, paid the $15, and recouped my losses
I bought one on eBay which was apparently stolen from Walmart. eBay refunded me completely.
TracFone told me that it must be scanned at Walmart and that since it wasn’t it’s basically garbage.
I went down to Walmart and the woman at the customer service counter was really unhelpful.
She was quite obnoxious and said that scanning it won’t help etc.
I then went to Electronics in the back where there was a kindly Old gentleman who thought this story was really interesting and scanned it for me and I was able to pay.
The phone worked great afterwards!
One interesting thing that happened, when I walked in the store it beeped like I was taking something stolen. And when I left the store even after I paid it beeped again.
The woman there who was the guard told me that it’s fine because she had heard it beep on the way in too.
What I’m curious about is if they are store-specific and you have to scan it at the store where it was intended to be sold at. I think I tried Best Buy also, and it didn’t work at the time. Also, last time I had the box, so I had the barcode of the item. Here, I only have the IMEI barcode on the sticker. Maybe I have a different box that I can use for the UPC…
I wanna know how hard it is to unlock the phone manually and shoin
Obviously only for hypothetical theoretical educational purposes only exclusively and intrinsically and inclusively (what other English words do I know?)
For example if you flash every single partition from an unlocked phone won’t that do it? And I’m sure you don’t need to do that in order to unlock. I just never looked into it
IMEI switching is 1 part and then the actual on device unlock
It is specific to the store.
TracFone actually told me that it’s from Walmart. I offered to pay TracFone directly but they told me that I can only pay Walmart.
Seems like it’s a deal that the retailers have with them to prevent theft.